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Asia Adrift

The year 2012 began with festering Chinese sovereignty claims in the South and East China Seas, but also with hope that a code of conduct brokered by ASEAN would enable them to be resolved peacefully. The year is ending, however, with those hopes dashed and ASEAN more divided than it has ever been.

NEW DELHI – The year 2012 began with festering Chinese sovereignty claims in the South and East China Seas, but also with hope that a code of conduct brokered by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations would enable them to be resolved peacefully. The year is ending, however, with those hopes dashed and ASEAN more divided than it has ever been. Indeed, a handful of its members now seem eager to subordinate their national interests – and the interests of ASEAN – to those of China.

China’s increasing assertiveness in staking its claims contributed to the landslide victory of the defense-minded Liberal Democrats in Japan, and to the conservative Park Geun-hye’s election as South Korea’s first-ever female president. Rising regional tensions also provided the backdrop to US President Barack Obama’s trip to Southeast Asia shortly after his re-election.

Obama announced the United States’ strategic “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific region in January 2012, and a whirlwind of activity there – from Australia to Indonesia to India – marked America’s security diplomacy throughout the year. In Japan, too, worries about Chinese assertiveness have become so powerful that a government that showed considerable hostility to the US-Japan alliance when it came to power three years ago had, by November, begun to trumpet the alliance’s mutual-defense commitments as it confronted China’s claim to the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands.

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Jaswant Singh was the first person to have served as India’s finance minister (1996, 2002-2004), foreign minister (1998-2004), and defense minister (2000-2001). While in office, he launched the first free-trade agreement (with Sri Lanka) in South Asia’s history, initiated India’s most daring diplomatic opening to Pakistan, revitalized relations with the US, and reoriented the Indian military, abandoning its Soviet-inspired doctrines and weaponry for close ties with the West. His most recent book is India at Risk: Mistakes, Misconceptions and Misadventures of Security Policy.

Mr Singh points out a steadily developing challenge to the maintenance of peace and stability across East Asia. His finger is aimed at China and its domestically insecure leadership seeking foreign devils to quieten the restive multitudes at home. The fact that the latter, too, are pushing the party-elite to restore China's honour presumably lost in past conflicts with invading imperial powers from across the various bodies of water during a hundred-years of humiliation since the First Opium War, is often lost in the non-Sinic discourse.

Virtually any encounter with young Chinese university undergraduate along the coast will demonstrate the force of the passion with which Chinese citizens believe that their ancestors had been grievously wronged by foreign invaders from Japan, Europe and America who, using the destructive lethality of their military power against the backward and ill-organised Chinese society of the time, imposed the kinds of terms on China which today would be considered unthinkable. The Chinese do not, according to young university students, seek restitution; the seek an acknowledgement of the wrongs inflicted on a weak China. And, in this view, since China is no longer weak, it will not countenance any repetations of such humiliation. This, incidentally, is not the view emanating from Zhongnanhai, but from the grassroots, to the extent such a category can be discerned from among the urban youth and university students.

Mr Singh refers to the tacit forging of a coalition against China bringing together all of China's critics in the wider Asia-Pacific region. The coalescence of such an anti-Chinese coalition may provide some sense of security to its diverse (and diversity is their hallmark, apart from the unifying anxiety about China) members, but whether this putative bloc will force the Chinese netizenry to cower in fear and urge the CPC PBSC to withdraw all its historical maritime/territorial claims in proximate seas is somewhat less certain. In fact, the reverse may well be true.

Perhaps what China's anxious neighbours should fear more is an emotive convergence and synergy between China's increasingly vociferous and nationalist tendencies at the grassroots on the one hand and the CPC elite on the other, than the pronouncements of PLA officers and security analysts. If the Chinese system (for want of a better word) develops the measure of national cohesion sought but so far not attained by the CPC, and the global economy remains as integrated as the existing financial, commercial and economic linkages render it today, then, polarisation between China (virtually bereft of any effective allies) on the one hand, and America-India-Japan-and their partners on the other, could well generate the strategic insecurity backdrop coloured by mutually reinforcing security dilemmas against which relatively minor incidents could escalate into uncontrollable conflagrations.

Muscular military-focused responses by all sides are now creating such a milieu. States are investing so much treasure and face into mutually exclusive positions that they are painting themselves almost irrevocably into opposing corners. Taking these powerful trends to their logical conclusion, the regional sub-system and, indeed, the global system, can look forward to a somewhat delayed realisation of the Mayan prediction of the end of the civilised world.

There may still be room and a little time for diplomacy to bring temperatures down a notch and expand the space for negotiations to begin in earnest. But for such a non-destructive path to be adopted, globally focused statesmanlike leadership is needed on both shores of the Pacific. With freshly anointed leaders in place not only in Washington and Beijing, but also Tokyo and Seoul, an opportunity, and a test, may be in place now.

The problem is that China has every reason to be bellicose: military adventurism would divert attention from domestic issues, pump prime a slowing economy and give the gender imbalance of far more males something to focus upon. The only thing China fears is provoking an ever strengthening coalition of middle powers against it.

Heartening to see that a Communist China played a major role in ushering democracy in Burma. but did it play a role as big that necessitated the transition?, it seems democracy has given Burma the mettle to revoke a Chinese contract for Hydroelectric power project that largely benifited China than Burma.